Posted
by
kdawsonon Saturday June 02, 2007 @08:15PM
from the embrace-extend-extinguish-yourself dept.

hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."

Huh, strange that Science and Nature are using a standard text editor format at all. You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose(based on my experiences on writing math on computers).

Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

I always wondered why scientists and mathematicians used the error-prone and easy-to-confuse-with-the-Latin-alphabet Greek alphabet, while less ambiguous (and perhaps easier) alternatives, such as the Cyrillic or Egyptian alphabets, remain unused. Also, I think "cat" and "roach" would be awesome variables.

That doesn't mean you should use lowercase rho for density (looks like p) or lowercase omega for angular velocity (looks like w) when something completely unambiguous like a little pictogram kittycat would work just as well.

I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

This smells of the 80/20 rule in Office: 80% of the people only use (or even know about) 20% of the functionality. Being good at formatting math is just part of the functionality of LaTeX. There are lots of things that LaTeX is good at (and Office stinks at), which would probably be quite useful to you.

PDF Publishing. Nowadays, if your paper isn't published on the web as a PDF, it isn't nearly as influential. Some people won't even bother reading it. Now, if you're on a Mac, publishing to PDF is pretty good, but no such luck for Windows. You have to buy Acrobat separately.

Citations and bibliographies. Hmm, LaTeX comes with BibTeX; I haven't manually generated a citation or a bibliography entry since forever. I don't even have to write the BibTeX; just Google "paper title + bibtex" or check one of the standard online sources. Office has minimal support for bibliographies; guess you'll have to buy EndNote.

Support for concurrent editing. LaTeX lets you split up your sections into multiple chunks; indeed it encourages you to do so. So I can be working on one section and my coauthors can work on others. Now, truthfully, we *do* use RCS to synchronize, but we've done it without it. Or you could be fancy and use CVS or SVN and have concurrent editing of the same file. Word, um, can't do that. At all.

Automatic formatting. It always amazes me that people are willing to fight with Word to get their document to meet a formatting requirement. In LaTeX, I just download the style file provided by the conference. Now, Word does have templates, but they seem rather fragile to me, and while Science and Nature may give templates (I don't know), some other journals do not.

Really, Office isn't nearly as good as people make it out to be. And LaTeX isn't nearly as hard; especially if you use one of the WYSIWYG editors.

1. PDF publishing is supported (free) with a download from the Microsoft website (the only reason it wasn't bundled is because Adobe didn't want it to be).

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word: there's that whole "Reference" tab. Not having used BibTeX I can't compare - but then, neither can you, apparently.

3. Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing. I don't know what that entails, but it's there, and easy to find.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference? Templates seem rather fragile to you, and some journals don't offer them. I'm not sure this even needs rebutting -- failure to offer templates isn't Word's fault, and, well they seem solid to me, so we're at 1:1

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively, but I do know it's not as bad as you make it out to be. That 80/20 rule is precisely what Microsoft tried to address with their new layout, since -- probably due to their ubiquity -- the Office products are routinely underrated as far as their functionality goes (probably less so by the/. crowd); Excel, for instance, has some powerful statistical tool. Sure, it's no STATA, but before I shell out $900 on STATA I'd rather install some modules and read some documentation.

Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time.

Fair enough. I use OneNote on a Tablet PC on a daily basis, and the improvement in OneNote 2007 over 2003 was easily worth the AUD$75 I got it for (hooray for Australia [itsnotcheating.com.au])

Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing?

As long as you choose the correct page size (the PDF plugin defaults to "Letter", whereas I print to A4), yes.

Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast?

Excellent. I've tried various free PDF Printers (for non-office applications), and this wipes the floor with them. The files sizes are small (unless I've got a whole lot of handwritten stuff, but that's only in OneNote), the fonts

My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot.

You can do all that in MS Word too. So why does your husband use LaTeX?

I cannot speak for her husband, but maybe the reason is that most math journals will not accept anything but LaTeX (or maybe AMSTeX). Also, MS equation editor is incredibly painful, using LaTeX is simply so much easier. In grad school I had a part time job working for a textbook publisher, and had to write couple hundred pages in MS Word, with bunch of (relatively simple) equations, and it was one of the most painful things I have ever done.

Why LaTeX?! Anyone who ever used LaTeX extensively would find your question insane.
The brief answers is - because it is much more convinient, powerful, user-friendly; because it is
takes much less time to LaTeX a document than to type it in Word; because Word was never meant to be
a typestting/publishing tool, and LaTeX was...
It's like asking "You can move around on a wheelchair, why use feet ?"

Neither does he. You don't need LaTeX to write mathematics. The field got along quite well for a rather long time before LaTeX came to be.

Sure. For that matter, you don't need a computer, typewriter, ink, or paper either. Just draw figures in the sand with a stick like Archimedes. However, LaTeX is easy to learn, portable, and produces visually pleasing mathematics. Word processors are clumsy, non-portable, and produces mathematics that looks as if it were written by a sixth-grader.

When you use LaTeX you get what you wanted fairly quickly, and it comes out the same on any computer anywhere, and you end up with PDFs that do the same, so you can take them to a conference. And journals accept it.

When you use MS word it takes forever to get anything like what you wanted (subscripts on superscripts, tower-type functions?), then when you change something elsewhere in the document or email it to a coauthor something breaks and the equations get changed. And you end up trying to use powerpoint to do presentations, which means you take it to a conference and what appears on the screen is a bunch of hearts and spades instead of the right symbols (seen this happen, just once). Which is why journals generally don't accept it.

LaTeX predates MS word, anyway. Before that, you sent a handwritten or typed paper to the journal, which again isn't going to get there and have all the equations different to how they looked when you wrote it.

That said, if I was trying to write a paper with lots of detailed diagrams I might not want to use LaTeX; it's fine for line and block diagrams (which is all I need for combinatorics papers) via xfig, but I wouldn't want to try to, say, draw some anatomical thing. And it doesn't really seem to handle jpeg inclusion very nicely.

It's worth checking out the new Office2007 equation editor (which is also built into Wordpad in Vista). It typesets maths more elegantly than TeX thanks to kerning that's aware of the whitespace in each corner of a glyph or compound glyph. Also it's unicode through and through which allows for more uniformity between body text and equations. Apart from those things, it uses the standard tex-style algorithms for equations. The new equation editor itself is rock solid.

My experience is that most journals accept TeX submissions, but they strongly recommend submissions using a Word (2003 or earlier) template. Personally, I write all my papers using LaTeX, and submit the TeX-generated PDFs to the journals. Then I generate a Word document using a program like Tex2Word (or whatever) and submit that as well. The journal emails only the PDF (which, thanks to TeX, looks nice and professional) to the reviewers. The reason journals require a Word document is because it is simpl

"Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead. [Important: Screen legibility of the PostScript or PDF file is essential for rapid and thorough evaluation of your manuscript; please ensure that the.ps or.pdf file you generate from your TeX/LaTeX source does not include Type 3 bitmapped fonts.]

Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review. To save time at this later stage, authors using these packages for their initial submission are encouraged to review our instructions for preparing text and tables using LaTeX."

Maybe for writing it, but not for submissions. You tend to run into all sorts of conversion problems, font incompatibility among other things. Most printing houses only accept PDF from professional clients.

Word is a surprisingly common format in the publishing business. I work at an academic publishing house, handling the preparation of documents for printing. We publish most of the theses for a large university, as well as ~70 books and other publications a year.

Regarding books and similar projects, we try to accept any format we can convert to something you can import into a typesetting application. The thing is that among academics, more than the most basic knowledge of computers is uncommon. They use whichever program is available, most commonly Word. Formulae, graphs, even tables, are ofthen created in a suitable program, and inserted into the document as an image. We have the technical expertise to convert whatever they submit into something printable. It is not their concern, neither should it be.

I don't get why the journals would balk at any specific format, they should have the means to convert it anyway. Let the scientists worry about the science, and the publisher handle the preparation of the manuscript. In the worst case you request better source material, but that should be quite rare.

Still, I would love for all our authors to use something better than Word:)

Where I work, we likewise aren't using Office 2007 format... because we aren't set up to use Office 2007.

It is just a thought BUT maybe they are using Macs - I run a Mac and the Mac version of Word excel, Power Point cannot read the new version of 2007 Office. There is no converter - yet. (Yes, I use Office - but it drives me nuts!) It seems to me that MS is going back to the bad old days of forcing upgrades by removing compatibilities.

That journals accept anything but TeX/LaTeX. Of course some still accept typewritten documents (with a transcription fee), but if you have access to a computer why use Word (or OO writer) for serious writing?

It's not just easy, it's a huge time saver. Trying to making a long Word DOC act right is a death by a thousand clicks and it never really works well. Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things. If you just have to have buttons to press, use Kile.

Word Perfect was a reasonable editor for the purpose, but it was slain long ago.

Lyx allows you to write TeX without having to learn all the funny commands. It's just like how you can use KOffice to write ODF documents or MS Office 2007 to write OOXML documents;-) There are other LaTeX front ends that allow you to generate documents without having to learn all the tags, but I like Lyx and its free.

LyX also has the best equation editor I've seen. It's not as pretty as the *Offices' equation editors, but you can enter equations in without taking your hands off the keyboard, and even insert TeX markup that it doesn't understand without messing anything up.

But most importantly: the equations are treated like part of the text, so there's no clicking madly around the edges of invisible boxes that occasionally disappear to the end of the page just to edit something.

99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX. Even in math-heavy sub-fields, it's rare. Word is overwhelmingly the standard. My limited experience in working with chemists is the same.

Of course if those people had any clue, they'd realize that file formats matter in the long run and if they use popular word processors, they will probably not be able to reopen their own documents 100% accurately in ten years time.

/me loads up technical document written using Word 95 while he was at university more than a decade ago. It works fine in any recent version of Word, and indeed in OpenOffice Writer.

/me tries running a technical document from the same period through his recently updated TeX installation. It fails: a couple of the packages are apparently obsolete now, and either no longer available via CTAN or at least no longer set up as standard with a mainstream TeX installation.

Every serious TeX user that I have known keeps a personal copy of
any non-standard packages, as I do. I have often printed out documents
that I wrote 20 years ago with no more difficulty than changing/usr2/poser/bin/tex to/home/poser/bin/tex in the include statements.
People who use Latex rather than raw Tex generally have an even easier time of it as they are less likely to be using unusual macro packages.

Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash. If any one of these things were to come alone it would not have been this bad, but judging by the reaction from several companies including my own, this i driving people to look at OSX as a viable option.

Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash. If any one of these things were to come alone it would not have been this bad, but judging by the reaction from several companies including my own, this i driving people to look at OSX as a viable option.

Anyone who predicts the end of Microsoft risks looking like an idiot since these predictions have been going on for decades and yet Microsoft is still here and as strong as ever. That being said, allow me to risk looking like an idiot by agreeing with you.:) I don't see Microsoft going away anytime soon but I think that there are some risks for them out there now that simply did not exist in the past.

1. Office is Microsoft's bread and butter. Everybody used Office so anyone wanting to work with other people had to be in the Office game. Even if there were alternatives that might have been better from a technical perspective, Office was already the 800lb gorilla. People were no more going to switch from Office than they would switch from QWERTY keyboards.2. The international push by governments to move to an open document format is huge. To do business with these governments, now you're forced to use a different word processor. This sort of mandate helps to redefine the playing field. As you said, on it's own this is not a ballbuster for Microsoft.3. As you mentioned, Office 2007 is a pain in the ass.4. Vista sucks.5. This is another killer factor: you can get Linux on the desktop now, and not just for geeks. I used to scratch my head wondering what people on Slashdot were talking about when they said they had Grandma running on Linux. Not anymore. The latest friendly distros like Ubuntu are ready for normal people to use. Everything they need to see is there, open, friendly, no muss, no fuss. If somebody told me I had to explain Ubuntu to my mom, my first response would no longer be "shoot me now."

While I don't think any of this is going to lead to the inevitable collapse of Microsoft in the coming weeks, I think it could be the start of a downward slide, at least in terms of operating system and office app markets. Historically speaking, powerful and unstoppable kingdoms/empires/corporations tend not to be destroyed from outside but from within. Laziness, neglect, a lack of imagination and vision, all of these things will hollow out the entity until a trifling problem could become the crisis that finally brings the end. The problems we're seeing right now could be the start of that. But given Microsoft's size and clout, I think we'll be waiting a long time for the final curtain.

Plenty of businesses still own and run old hardware - it still works so why upgrade. In your world the problem is insignificant simply because you have the money available in such quantities that you don't need to care and can afford to be arrogant to the issues others face. The problem is simplistic, how do the remaining masses address your oddball (incompatible) MS-2007 xml document format. Is there a patch or plug-in for Abiword, applixware, koffice, gnome office, openoffice, frame maker, etc, etc, etc. Explain to me why I should lay out the bucks just to run an MS based machine to deal with your standard factory acceptance of the microsoft way.

Sure, there's a free one for other versions of Microsoft Office, but almost none for any other suite. Your logic is intriguing, all us nutjob nux/FOSS gearheads are so apathetic we don't want to accept it simply because it's different. No concept that some of us might be using other operating systems or have a different bottom line that dictates how and why we do things.

Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".

What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?

I'm assuming that they haven't actually converted to non-MS (or non-IBM) systems. That would be just too bizarre to believe. Do you think that they've actually noticed that non-MS systems can usually read files from 20 years ago without problems? Is this some sign of a pending movement in which more organizations will actually start standing up to the Market Leader?

Nah; it can't be. Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.

Word has only changed file formats once in recent memory, between Word 95 and 97 (or 6.0 and 98 in the Mac versions).

I remember exactly the same issues that time. Word 97.doc format was not widely accepted until at least 1999. Once Vista and Office 2007 are widely adopted, which will occur within a three-year replacement cycle, and Office 2008 for Mac is well established, the new formats will become standard and there will no longer be a peep of protest, whether or not MS has fixed the issues with the fo

Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".

What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?

Without knowing anything about how Science or Nature actually publishes things, I suspect that in the last couple of years they have gone for more an

[p]Macros that have worked even back in Office97 are now broken. A contractor at work tried to go buy Office at any Brick n' Mortar place, and since 2007 is the only one available, he's pretty much screwed...
[p]I wish OOo had really good macro compatibility. If it does, let me know (email shown)

Take that a step further and really wonder why MS got as big as it did. IBM came out with the AS400 in 1988 and promised that programs written for it would never be obsolete. A textile company in NC is using a program written for an IBM S36 on the latest version of the AS400. The program is 25 years old! Big companies use custom software and can't afford the hassles of the shrinkwrap world. Think about a 20 year old program that has been maintained and modified for that timeperiod it might be a million doll

There is no reason to expect a company to support old formats forever. There are many rational reasons to prefer Word over OpenOffice, which is why many people do. Someday, that may change, but that day has not arrived.

If they are trying to sell their product to businesses that might have to go back to 'forever' to retrieve data, there certainly is a good reason. I'm waiting for the first time a company gets sued for using MS Office by their shareholders because they lost a large lawsuit due to an inability to retrieve documents. Today, you can still get your hands on old copies of Word, and old copies of Windows that the old Word will run on. That might not always be the case. If someone needs to get some documents o

...I would love to say "Ha Ha! Proof that Microsoft's end is near." But this is typical for version changes. If you didn't yet spent the thousands of $$ to upgrade, then you won't be able to read the newer formats. It's that simple. The only real story here is they are pushing ODF, which is nice to see.

The point is that they did try and it turns out that Word 2007 screws up the math, even if you save the results in Office 2003 formats. As it turns out, mathematics is the language of Science and Nature. So, while many of us can go thought life without ever writing a contour integral, most of us will never be published in Science or Nature either (the closest I got was Physical Review Letters). Unless you want to assure us that you can handle complex math expressions with you free patches, I would suggest that you have a bit more respect for the staff of Science and Nature. They are reacting to a observed problem. I'll bet you that they tried the free patches before they decided to warn scientists all over the world about submitting articles using Word 2007.

I thought that they barely took office format at all anymore. I was under the impression that they preferred LaTeX. Everyone that I know in my department (Aerospace Engineering) would not think of using anything but LaTeX for journal submissions- to do otherwise is cruel to the typesetters and asking for your article to look horrible.In general, a WYSIWYG format, whether ODF or DOC format, will not be what you get in the journal, since any good journal will do some heavy formatting changes in order to make

There are a few reasons that Science and Nature prefer Word to TeX. First, they are not nearly as equation-heavy as a pure physics or mathematics journal would be. Second, they've got a publishing workflow that takes Word as an input and ties into the rest of their technology. They don't care how well Word typesets documents, they want common input formats that they can rip information out of and edit themselves.

TeX and LaTeX are great if you've got substantial finicky needs (esp around equations) that you really need the author to get right, and to be able to carry that through. However, to support that comes at a price. As the TUGBoat editors experience on an ongoing basis, publishing a journal composed of arbitrary TeX content from different authors is difficult. Different authors may use conflicting macro packages, or it may be harder to coerce each into the house style.

LaTeX isn't just good for equations and other science-specific data - LyX and a decent BibTeX manager (I use BibDesk on OS X) are a great way of keeping large volumes of material well-managed for work in any academic field. Without LaTeX/BibTeX/LyX, I would have probably have never finished my (fairly research heavy) undergraduate dissertation (philosophy).Now I have switched to XML-based formats and use XSL-FO and Apache FOP to turn it in to PDF/PostScript. I have complete control over the whole process an

My department has started getting Office 2007 files and we find it irritating. We are not ready to go there yet. We have many macros that interface to our database that must be rewritten. It will probably be a year or so before our small I.S. department has time to convert to Office 2007.

The amount of money that will be spent to rewrite code that works with Word 2007 will not be insignificant and the real down side is that we get virtually nothing for our effort!

This is interesting. We are looking at upgrading Office, and both Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org 2.2 are being considered. I had thought that Office 2007 would be able to use existing macros, but if this is not the case it could help tip the scales in favor of OO.o. After some study, it turns out that OO.o has templates that are more capable that Word (See thesis instructions from MIT [mit.edu] or David Wheeler's blog [dwheeler.com]. (Even if you don't want to write a thesis, they do represent a highly structured documents with

Okay, I know the popular stance on this site will be "Why aren't they using x open source open standard format! Why aren't they using some latex!?!!?"

Firstly, I am a CS major and have a number of linux machines..and TBH I am not even sure how latex works...how can you expect writers to know about this format which is primarily (as far as I can tell) used in *nix?

If it were me, I'd just demand PDF and be done with. So much wasted energy in this.

Knowledge of TeX/LaTeX is pretty much a prerequisite in the Maths and Physical Sciences. I'm not so surprised that a CS major missed out. No disrespect, one of my majors was CS, too.
It depends on what you typically write, but once you learn LaTeX you might find it hugley more sensible than any WYSIWYG system. I did.

LaTeX generates both Postscript and PDF. I don't know anyone who would submit or accept raw LaTeX source. All the journals I've looked at took either.doc or PDF, with the expressed requirement that it be "a single, self-contained file." You don't get that with LaTeX. Unless you're a masochist, all your references are in BibTeX, and all your graphs are in either PDF or EPS format, not that weird line-draw TeX command thing.

I submit to some physics journals (Physical Review D, for example). They -prefer- LaTeX source with.eps figures. Though I use BibTeX with an external.bib database for references, I explicitly cut-and-paste the contents of the resulting.bbl file into the main paper draft.

I -think- they'll allow PDF or postscript submission of the whole thing, but it's slower to process, and they might add charges.

Firstly, I am a CS major and have a number of linux machines..and TBH I am not even sure how latex works...how can you expect writers to know about this format which is primarily (as far as I can tell) used in *nix?

TeX is pretty much standard in physics and math. I'm a physics student and TeX was the second thing we were taught in the computer introduction course -- after learning how to log in and do basic file management in Linux. It's just a matter of learning it.

FWIW, the journals I publish to accept Word, PDF or TeX. Satisfies all crowds. If you don't want to do TeX, and don't want to pay for Word, use Open Office and export as PDF. No one is saying that they should require TeX and nothing else.

In a normal CS curriculum, you probably won't need to use TeX at all as an undergrad. On the outside, you might have one math/theory course where the prof thinks it's worth knowing. If you continue on to graduate studies, OTOH, the use of TeX increases significantly.

For years and years, I fell into the fold where if Microsoft came out with something new, I upgraded. Latest and greatest was always the best. Then when XP came out, I somehow didn't find myself rushing to upgrade. The computer I was using at the time would barely run the OS and the newer Office software didn't mean anything to me except for occasions when someone would send me a document I couldn't read. (Though at some time close to that I was also trying out OpenOffice...guess what I was using to ope

What makes you think that will fix the equation editor problem with M$'s new formats?

They did "fix" the equation editor. The result is the new one that Office 2007 uses by default.

The original one was a third-party package Microsoft bought and put into Word, and could be somewhat daunting. The new one is simpler and built into the ribbon, but really only useful for one-line formulas.

Something everyone's missing, though: THE ORIGINAL EQUATION EDITOR IS STILL IN OFFICE 2007!. Put in your "Microsof

I use to have a machine that BSOD on upgrade to service pack 2. Office 2007 won't install on pre SP2. From another machine I used Word 2007 to send out resumes to several prospective employers only to have them request 1997-2003 format because they couldn't read my Word documents. I do government work now and where I work they have standardized on Windows 2000 with the Office 2003. I doubt Office 2007 would work on their machines and for reasons of security and stability and having gotten so many machin

For those with older Office (2000 to 2003), why not use the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [microsoft.com] for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats? I have not run into any 2007 files yet since I still use 2000, but at least I am ready if any appear.

although it'd be nice if Slashdot editors can be bothered to spell his name correctly.
Many posts so far express some surprise that journals even accept anything other than Latex. Having been through the system several times, I can say that the reason that big journals like Science and Nature accept MS docs as the default format is because of biologists.
Essentially, Latex is used only in Mathematics and Physics related sciences. Unlike them, most biologists don't know much about computers, and couldn't really give a rat's arse about the formats.
Having trained in Physics (Bachelor) and Med/Bio (PhD) and now working in bioinformatics, I have had many arguments with people about this particular issue. My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files. I've bitched many times to my old boss that he was spending a few thousand dollars on getting Photoshop licenses just to crop some pictures or change the levels. Although the lack of proper CYMK support in GIMP is a bit of a setback, but even then, just a couple licenses would have been sufficient for that purpose, rather than getting a license for every machine. I mean, these guys were using Photoshop as an image _viewer_!
The situation in Physics is quite diffferent. Of course there are many hardcore OSS users, but many people just used BSD/Linux/(and even some old Unix machines are still chugging along), simply because they are free and they are sometimes also the best tools for the job.
I remember in a few years ago working with an Astrophysics group during a summer vacation, and we had some time on the Parkes telescope, and we were able to remotely control the telescope from Sydney, which would have been impossible under MS Windows (at the time).
Back to the point, ODF would hopefully bridge this difference, since if the biological scientists want to learn Latex, a WYSIWYG editor using ODF (such as OpenOffice.org) should be acceptable to them.

Has anybody at Slashdot ever actually submitted anything to a journal? You are all advocating LaTeX but the truth is many journals will not accept anything other than a single column.doc file that they can copy and paste into their fancy typesetting software. A LaTeX file is useless to them as they use none of its typesetting features. I tried it once and got turned down because they wanted the.doc version pain in the ass but I learned my lesson.

Pretty much every math journal out there accepts LaTeX. Some of them actually require LaTeX. Lats year I had to help a colleague of mine from our computer science department convert a paper drom word to LaTeX, because he was submitting it into a math journal, and LaTeX was the only format they would accept.

Why? Because some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use. They type in their stuff, use the equation editor, etc, done.

The average user cattle doesn't care about the data format war, only the technical folks. It is a power that should not be wielded lightly, this format war.

some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use.

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.
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Friends don't help friends install MS junk.

Science and Nature don't cater to people that spend all day writing emacs macros to prove their lambda calculus theorems, it's for people that wear labcoats and do chemical/biological research. I have a Master's degree in a cellular biology. I've worked with a lot of PhD candidates and tenured professors. Dozens of papers were published yearly. The secretary was more computer literate than most of them.

computer literacy aside, i've noticed that a ton of math and science academics know how to use latex really nicely, even if they don't know much about computers. it makes sense if you're doing a lot of equations/formulas and they need to be legible.

I wouldn't call her a push-over, but my wife is an experimental linguist who uses Word (and used Word for her diss). She uses a Mac, but generally upgrade to new versions as they come out to avoid problems reading docs from other people.

When she started working on her diss, I volunteered to learn LaTeX and BibTeX with her, to support her, bought a book on LaTeX, etc. But at the end of the day, she knew Word, and most of her colleagues and committee members used Word (especially the commenting and change-tracking features).

I've certainly known academics who used LaTeX, and even other stuff like roff. But most of the time, they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.

We're not being elitist, are we?

You owe me a nickel. I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.

And, by the way, none of them would ever think of the people they work with as "computer Inferiors" because they don't want to screw with TeX files.

Fine, take a look at my professor from my master's program - a woman who has a chaired professorship multiple multi-million dollar federal grants going at any one time. She had to have me copy and paste something for her once because she couldn't remember how to do it. She would freak if asked to use anything but Word, because she's barely learned that.

Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) becau

I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.

In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.

If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)

I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.

You failed to explain why the default thing to accept is a Word document and not an Open Office one. I don't know your field, but I am an academic, and have never met a faculty member who was simply so incompetent that he could use Word but not Open Office. If a journal demands something in Open Office and puts up relevant links on how to get it, very few will complain. So why should the default behavior be to accept something that costs the users money, and not accept something that won't?Regarding generat

Many of our scholars, while they generate terrific scholarly work, are just not computer-competent. I absolutely cannot imagine getting them to successfully install OpenOffice, or their IT departments (which are frequently not much better) to support it. (These are folks who call for support to ask things like "How do I make a table?") If you required ODF, you would lose some submissions from those who actually read the requirement, and get 99% of your others in.doc format (as I said, people don't even think about format -- if they are writing something, they just open Word, hit "Save," and send it.)

Every school I know about buys a site license for MS Office, and either extends that to students (at considerable expense) or *requires* students to purchase MS Office along with their computers. Honestly, the assumption of Word is so ingrained, trying to challenge it in the legal academic field would be emptying the ocean with a bucket.

I don't know about everyone in the legal field by a long shot. But, in the environments I'm familiar with, support gradually dwindled once WP shifted from DOS to Windows, partly because Windows key bindings sometimes conflicted with age-old WP ones and people had to relearn stuff anyway, partly because WP for Windows always has had some stability issues, and partly because the makers of expensive macro packages often used in law firms started to focus on developing for Word.

I'm guessing that your journal isn't in the field of science or mathematics.

People in math and many other sciences are not automatically computer savvy. For many people in science, the PC is more or less just for writing papers. Word has the wides acceptability because everyone has it. Many scientists don't care about the politics surrounding Microsoft, they are not computer scientists, and they have other things to care about. I know, shocking, but true.

I'm guessing that your journal isn't in the field of science or mathematics.

People in math and many other sciences are not automatically computer savvy.

That wasn't my point. It's just that LaTeX is the de facto standard for generating professional publications in most of the sciences, mathematics, and CS. So when he says his journal's authors wouldn't know WTF tex is, I can draw the conclusion with reasonable confidence that his journal isn't in one of those fields.

While that might be true, I personally would be willing to speculate that many people in those fields would have at least had some formal training on how to use TeX/LaTeX or some Equation Editing software, at least for the sake of completing a thesis.

One of my professors, who is a mathematician in academia, is not the most computer-savvy, but is using some distribution of Linux and knows how to write documents in TeX fairly well.

This kind of argument is much like English major students not knowing how t

For quite a lot of journals the submission format really doesn't matter as long as they can get the text and the images (which you often need to submit separately for final submission). The formatting you did is just used for reviewing (and as such only needs to be an approximation of the final format); the final submission is set from the raw text and images no matter what the original format was.Conferences (and newer, smaller journals) tend to be different in that they really do use the author-submitted

Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead.

Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review.
So as you can see,

Also, FTA, the reason that Word 2007 isn't being accepted is:

Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML.

I don't really see any conflicts here. If you submit to a journal, you don't send them source LaTeX initially, because then you have to send 15 eps graphics separately as well and then they have to muck about compiling it. It's easier (for both of you) to send them the compiled PDF or PS, which they can open, see it looks like mathematics, and bounce to an appropriate referee in a few minutes. Then after the referee reads it, the journal can come back and tell you to send along the LaTeX and graphics for publishing.

The difference is that people writing in those papres, id est Physicist and Mathematicians, are very well versed in informatics. Most of them have at least some basic knowledge of Unices, and at least do program in Mathlab and a little bit in Fortran.

They can understand what TeX is, and given the quantity of formulae they have to work with, they understand the advantages that TeX has to offer regarding them.

Why is it that Nature (not sure about Science) does not accept TeX documents? DOC? Why? It's probably the fault of the biologists. Silly biologists.

Nature is much more about life science. In those field you can find scientist which are way much more dexterous in manipulating micropipettes than computers. Most of them see computers as things that just have to work. They fire it up and use the mail client (Outlook express. Thunderbird is you have luck), browse a little bit (Internet Explorer or Firefox depending on the university) to find papres that they won't read on screen anyway but print on paper, and write with a word processor (i.e.: Word). They only time they write with anything else is... when they fire up PowerPoint to prepare a poster (Yes. There are tons of people abusing Powerpoint to do posters instead of using a proper publishing tools).The couple of them who feel enlightened and feel the urge to be different than the mass of sheeps, they buy Macs and install "Microsoft Office for Mac" on them.

Most of them don't realise that there other thing besides Word to handle text documents. And they all feel too much accustomed to Word to switch to anything else. They are the people who are upset when universities try to push for OpenOffice.org, because, they say, University should prepare their student to be proficient with tools that they will encounter later in professional life, and Word is what those student will find (as if being proficient with word processing in general was much different than learning Word down to the button position and being completely lost each time microsoft decides to change the layout for each new generation).

Want a worse example ? Medical doctors (I'm one). Some of the fellow doctors I've seen still do all their document formatting using space bar. There are highly considered specialists with a long list of publication that smash repeatedly on the space bar until things seem grossly aligned on screen. And then don't understand while the document doesn't come the same when they print it. Or open it in another version of Word.Those are the mythical "80%" people that only use "20%" of the feature of an office suite. Not a different set of "20%" than anyone else. The basic "20%" that form the common ground of any office suite. The "20%" of features that Word shares with Notepad.They have no concept of "styles" or flagging "titles" (they probably imagine an "index" is something you write tediously by hand. Usually they transmit that job to interns. Who go though the document painfully fixing the format so the "index" function works as intended).And you want them to switch to TeX when submitting papers to Life-Science journal ? They will just faint at the idea of launching something that doesn't look exactly like what they are used to on screen, and will have a hard time to find out which is the new icon to click to save.

And don't let me start about the level of maths and statistics we learn in medical school (near to absolute zero). Most of us hire a statistician whenever some button on a calculator need to be pressed. There's no such thing as a need for a better formula-writing environment.

Thankfully the arrival of bioinformatics, medical informatics, medical imaging and such computer intensive speciality in the field of life science will bring a little bit more computer litteracy. (Thankfully for me that are fields that I'm studying too, so there's plenty of job opportuni

Some people don't really know what they are talking about though--while this article has legitimate concerns, it is very easy to save compatible documents. Save as and then choose 'Word 97-2003 compatible,' done. Stop complaining.

From the article:

Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because co